Denise Jess walked into a Madison polling place on Saturday to vote early in person and encountered a familiar barrier: an absentee ballot envelope with a blank space for writing in her name, birthdate and address.

Jess, who is blind, chuckled along with her wife, who accompanied her to the polls. Who was going to do all that writing?

A poll worker quickly offered help, reminding Jess that she had the right to assistance. Jess, who is executive director of the Wisconsin Council of the Blind & Visually Impaired, knew she had those rights. But the moment still bothered her.

“It’s just a bummer,” she said, comparing voting with other tasks she performs independently, like identifying birds by ear, paying bills online, posting on social media, and grocery shopping. Voting is a constitutional right in Wisconsin and yet, she said, it remains far less accessible. 

Other industries have prioritized accessibility because it benefits their bottom line, she said, but voting systems were not originally designed with accessibility in mind.

“We’re making strides,” she said, “but it’s still always, always about retrofitting and trying to catch up.”

Jess’s experience illustrates a persistent tension in election policy: how to ensure both ballot security and accessibility for all voters. Electronic absentee voting is particularly nettlesome. Disability rights advocates have pushed for this option as a way for people with vision or other disabilities to vote independently, and in private, from home. But cybersecurity experts warn that current technology cannot guarantee that ballots returned electronically will be safe from hacking or manipulation.

Over a dozen other states provide fully electronic absentee voting for people with disabilities. In those states, voters with disabilities can receive a ballot electronically, mark it using a screen reader and return it electronically — similar to signing and returning a document electronically. Wisconsin isn’t one of them. Here, voters with disabilities must cast their votes on a paper ballot, or on an accessible voting machine at a polling place that prints out a paper ballot. 

That means that voters who are visually impaired or unable to write must often rely on others to complete their ballots — undermining ballot secrecy, which is also constitutionally protected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when many disabled voters were reluctant to visit the polls in person, Wisconsin’s rules presented an even bigger barrier. 

Last year, four voters with disabilities, along with Disability Rights Wisconsin and the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit seeking access to electronic absentee voting. A lower court initially granted some voters that option, but an appeals court paused and eventually reversed that order. The case is now before the Dane County Circuit Court. 

Beyond the roughly dozen states that offer fully electronic voting, a few others, including Vermont, Michigan, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, allow voters with disabilities to fill out ballots electronically, but they have to print out the ballots and return them by mail, drop box, or in person. Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election technology group, promotes this option as a step forward for states wary of fully electronic voting.

That wouldn’t solve the issue for everyone, though. Jess pointed out that many blind voters don’t own printers, meaning they’d still face accessibility hurdles.

Security concerns haven’t been resolved

At a time of heightened concern over election security and integrity, some technology experts say fully electronic voting is still not ready to be used widely.

Between August 2021 and September 2022, the University of California, Berkeley, hosted a working group of election, technology and cybersecurity experts to discuss the feasibility of creating standards to enable safe and secure electronic marking and return technologies. The group found that widespread adoption of electronic return would require technologies that don’t currently exist or haven’t been tested. 

A 2024 report by several federal agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Election Assistance Commission, found that sending digital copies of ballots to voters is safe and that filling them out electronically is somewhat safe, but that returning them electronically adds significant security risks.

“Sheer force of will doesn’t suffice to solve this problem,” said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting. “There needs to be extensive technical innovations that we can’t just dial up.”

Lindeman said threats from electronic ballot return include the possibility that somebody hacks into the system and changes votes. One potential safeguard — having voters verify that their selections were received and counted correctly — remains unproven at scale, the UC-Berkeley working group said. 

“That’s the fundamental technical tragedy at this stage of the game,” Lindeman said. “Paper ballots are obviously inconvenient for many voters. They pose real obstacles to voting, but we haven’t found a technical alternative to paper ballots that solves all the problems.”

Denise Jess chooses ‘path of least pain’

In Wisconsin, Jess chooses among three imperfect voting options.

She can vote on Election Day in her polling place, whose layout she has memorized, though it can get too busy for her comfort. She can vote using an accessible machine but still has to hand-sign the poll book, something she typically does with the assistance of a poll worker and a signature guide, a small plastic card with a rectangular cutout that frames the area where she has to sign. 

Alternatively, she can vote absentee in person during the early voting period, but then she has to receive help with paperwork and navigating an unfamiliar polling place. 

Or she can fill out an application online and vote by mail, which she avoids because she can’t fill out a paper ballot without assistance.

“It’s kind of like, what’s the path of least pain?” she said.

For this Wisconsin Supreme Court election, given the potential for bad weather, she opted for early in-person voting at the Hawthorne Public Library, which isn’t her regular polling place. 

“There’s enough consistency here at Hawthorne, but still there are surprises,” she said, sitting at a table at the library on Madison’s east side. “Even the simple navigation of going to the table to get the envelope, getting in line. They’re queuing people to wait behind the blue tape, which, of course, I can’t see.”

She could opt for more hands-on help from poll workers to speed up the process, but she said she sees her voting trips as a chance to learn more about the potential barriers for people with disabilities.

Some voters who are newer to vision loss or have more severe barriers can quickly become demoralized by the extra energy they need to put into casting a ballot, especially if poll workers aren’t trained or ready to help, she said. 

“We’ve had voters say, ‘I’m not going back. I’m just not doing that again, doing that to myself,’ she said. “So then we lose a voter.”

If electronic voting were available, Jess said, she would do it a lot more often than voting in person because she wouldn’t have to depend on transportation or the weather. 

“It would just be absolutely liberating,” she said. “I might still vote in-person at my polling place periodically, because I like my poll workers, and I always like to visit with them and give them kudos. But it would surely ease some stress.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

How one voter navigates Wisconsin’s hurdles for people with disabilities is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

City of Milwaukee election officials process absentee ballots at one location on Election Day, which sometimes means ballots are still being fed into tabulators late that night or early the next morning. Results are reported once processing finishes.

Conservative Brad Schimel, who faces liberal Susan Crawford in the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, suggested the late counting was malfeasance, a long-debunked claim.

Schimel on March 18 urged supporters to vote early “so we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines, like they did in 2018, or in 2024.”

Schimel lost his attorney general re-election bid in 2018. Republican Eric Hovde lost to U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., in the Nov. 5, 2024, election.

State law prohibits municipalities from preparing absentee ballots before Election Day. A bill that would allow an earlier start has stalled.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Wisconsin Watch: Did a late night ‘ballot dump’ in Milwaukee cost Eric Hovde the US Senate election?
• Reuters: Fact Check: Late-night Wisconsin election update for senator is not proof of fraud
• Votebeat: https://wisconsinwatch.org/2025/01/wisconsin-election-vote-ballot-absentee-clerks-milwaukee-republican-democrat/
• Associated Press: Schimel resurfaces debunked concerns about ballot counting in Milwaukee
• PolitiFact: No, an early morning influx of Milwaukee votes doesn't prove the Wisconsin Senate race was stolen
• WISN radio: Jay Weber Show – 3-18-25 Brad Schimel joins Jay and Past comments from Demo
• Milwaukee County Clerk: Milwaukee County 2024 General Election – Unofficial Results
• Wisconsin Watch: Does Wisconsin state law prohibit counting absentee ballots before Election Day?

Did Milwaukee election officials at the end of ballot counting ‘find bags of ballots that they forgot’? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Voting carrels set up at Madison's Hawthorne Library on Election Day 2022. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

In-person absentee voting in Wisconsin’s spring elections began Tuesday, allowing voters across the state to cast absentee ballots at their municipal clerk’s office or other designated locations. 

Each municipality sets its own hours and locations for early voting access, local details can be found at the websites of local governments, the state election commission, or myvote.gov. 

On the ballot this spring are races for the state Supreme Court, state superintendent of schools, a proposed constitutional amendment codifying the state’s law requiring a photo ID to vote and local races for city council, school board and circuit court judgeships. 

To cast an in-person absentee ballot, voters need to be registered, which can be done online at MyVote.wi.gov or at a municipal clerk’s office. Voters also need to show a photo ID to receive a ballot. Acceptable IDs include a state-issued driver’s license, military ID card, U.S. passport and university IDs (only student IDs that expire within two years of issuance are accepted. If a student ID is expired, you may use it along with proof of current enrollment such as a tuition receipt or course schedule). 

In-person absentee voting ends March 30 and the deadline to request an absentee ballot by mail is March 27 — though if a request is made that late there will likely not be enough time for a voter to receive and return the ballot through the mail. Absentee ballots can also be returned to a municipal clerk’s office, a voter’s poll location on Election Day or to absentee ballot drop boxes in municipalities that use them. 

Election Day is April 1. 

Madison city hall during the April 2020 spring election. (Henry Redman

The progressive voting rights-focused firm Law Forward filed a class action lawsuit against the city of Madison and Dane County Thursday over the 193 absentee ballots that city election workers lost and didn’t count during the 2024 election. 

The ballots were found in sealed courier bags after the Nov. 5 election and not counted even though the bags were discovered for the ballots to be added to the final vote tally. Law Forward staff said the lawsuit was filed because voters were denied their constitutional right to vote. 

“The goal of this lawsuit is to reinforce and strengthen the right to vote in Wisconsin law, the right to vote is absolutely fundamental in our democracy, the cornerstone of our entire system of governance,” Jeff Mandell, Law Forward’s general counsel, said at a news conference Thursday. “Law Forward exists to defend and advance democracy in Wisconsin, standing up for the right to vote, whenever and wherever it may be violated, is a key part of Law Forward’s mission. This lawsuit is not an attack on any individual municipality or election official. It is instead a necessary and important defense of the right to vote in Wisconsin.” 

Since discovering the mistake, the city has notified the public about the error and participated in an investigation into how it occurred. 

Dylan Brogan, spokesperson for Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, said the city couldn’t comment on the pending litigation, but that city officials have worked to make sure the mistake isn’t repeated.

“The City of Madison takes election integrity extremely seriously,” Brogan said. “Our Clerk’s Office has issued a public apology and reached out to affected voters directly to apologize for the failure to count their absentee ballot. They have also taken a number of steps to ensure this never happens again. Ahead of the February primary, election officials were trained on new safeguards and procedures for handling absentee ballots. Internal review of the incident is still underway, and additional steps may be taken. The City is also looking forward to any additional guidance the Wisconsin Election Commission may offer to further strengthen our elections processes.”

For now, Law Forward is representing four of the voters whose ballots went uncounted, but Mandell said the remaining 189 voters would have the ability to join the lawsuit if a judge allows the class action to move forward. The suit requests that damages totalling $175,000 be paid to each affected voter — which exceeds the $50,000 limit under state law for claims against municipalities. 

If all 193 voters participate and receive the full requested amount of damages, the city would be forced to pay more than $33.7 million for the error. 

“The truth is the right to vote is valuable, and I think that we are in an ecosystem where standing up for the right to vote matters,” Law Forward staff counsel Scott Thompson said. “Across the country, there have been efforts to subvert the right to vote, and we believe that this litigation sends a message to anyone who might seek to do something like that. In Wisconsin, there’s going to be a price to pay.”

At a meeting on Friday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission is set to hear an update on its investigation into the issue and how the ballots were lost. Among the actions it may take, the commission could decide to issue a statement to municipal clerks across the state reminding them of the best practices when handling absentee ballots.